Seven minutes after the first bolt, one hundred and twenty stoves completed not one shared cycle but one hundred and twenty separate attempts.
Seven furnaces lost their draught. Three operators stopped production because the second witness heard someone else's memory in the key. Two streets managed to create only one spark each. The remaining batches produced between four and six forms.
The white loudspeakers declared the expansion a failure.
Saya recorded a different result: not one disputed key had passed beyond the first cycle, and not one street that stopped had lost the right to start again.
At the two mobile stoves, an argument arose over what counted as a street. The carriages held people from different districts, while the furnaces stood on shared rails. The couplers proposed deciding by a majority of passengers. An elderly woman with a copper box objected: the bedridden could not reach the vote and would once again become a convenient minority.
The passengers chose one witness from each carriage. An urgent decision required the consent of those who could not be moved to another stove. They delayed the first batch by three minutes. But instead of protecting the whole train, they assigned it to steam for the front carriage and carriers for the bedridden.
One coupler said they would never manage to create twelve thousand forms that way. Yuna pointed to the windows of the neighbouring districts. Their delay did not stop anyone else's cycles. The three minutes lost belonged only to the two carriage furnaces, not to the whole city.
The conductor could no longer check every memory with the silver thread. All that remained of her licence was a short length of thread around her wrist. So she divided the checking among the witnesses and listened not to all one hundred and twenty wishes, but to the moments when two human answers diverged.
Yuna's red light marked a safe path. A dimmed white light warned of doubt in the key. Until the two signals agreed, the stove released no new batch.
During the second cycle, the storm covered the western streets. For the people there, seven minutes stretched to almost an hour. Dead relatives stepped out of the rain and asked them to open the cut-offs. The operators heard familiar voices, but the second witnesses checked not the likeness, but the boundary of consent.
At one stove, a father heard his dead daughter. The girl asked him to send carriers to a house that no longer existed. The father knew it was a lie and still reached for the key. His witness did not take it from him by force. She asked whether he had named that address during the vote.
He had not.
The stove remained closed until the next cycle. The phantom daughter wept beyond the damper, while the father sat beside it and did not pretend that the right decision lessened the pain.
The storm reached the northern district five minutes later. The local operator had time to release mirrors and draw the front towards empty reservoirs. At the hospital, the first cycle went to holders for the steam pump, the second to carriers, the third to listeners for the roof.
During the fourth cycle, damp ash clogged three furnaces. The stove-setters asked to open the common store and take dry reserves without recording them. Dara refused: after a distribution like that, nobody could prove that the sealed sacks containing voices had not entered production.
The stoker's mother checked the numbers, the track workers carried over only clean mineral ash, and the children marked every sack with red thread. The three stoves missed another batch. The neighbouring nodes did not create batches for them, because that would have exceeded their local limit and left their own streets without cut-offs.
Instead, the northern district sent them finished listeners along two confirmed routes. The forms kept their existing task and passed under new operators only after stopping at the boundary. Not one stove grew by silently absorbing another.
The network grew not by a uniform number, but by a timetable of needs.
Marek relayed safe pockets through eleven direct listeners. He did not tell the stoves which forms to create. One district requested a mirror; another replied that it needed a seam. Yuna linked these answers with red lamps, and Beran moved the train only after living confirmation from the next set of points.
During the fifth cycle, Ella's light appeared beside the dead branch line.
Marek did not see her face. A figure of familiar height stood in an empty window, dark hair touching its collar, one hand striking an invisible kettle five times with a spoon.
Then the voice called him to the central stove.
If Marek left the route, it claimed, a safe passage to the Chamber would open there, along with his sister's complete memory. The voice did not promise power. It asked only that he come alone, while the network knew how to live without him.
The temptation sounded more truthful than before, because Marek had already relinquished central control. Yuna and Beran could lead the train. His departure would not necessarily destroy the rescue.
He raised his hand and answered with a sixth knock on the handrail.
The silhouette stopped, as though that was precisely what it had been waiting for.
Marek did not follow it.
Marek used the red lamp to report a false pocket on the central line. Then he returned to the list of routes without trying to complete the face. The emptiness remained empty, and the rhythm did not become proof of an order.
During the eighth cycle, the rain washed out the lower track. Carriers could not fly, and mirrors lost their edges. Beran proposed moving the train in short bursts of seven seconds. The driver applied power for six seconds and released the wheels on the seventh, while the workers scattered dry ash ahead of the next movement.
Each burst carried the train forwards by the length of one carriage.
Yuna sent the rhythm through the windows: six red flashes for movement, one dark pause. The people in the carriages beat it out on the walls with their hands. Even when the storm drowned the light outside, Beran could hear the right tempo through the rails.
By the twelfth cycle, the different districts had amassed different strengths. The hospital had more carriers, the railway more seams, the outer districts more mirrors. No operator could take another's reserve. Transferring forms to neighbours required two signals and a new route spoken aloud.
Marek was wrong about one safe pocket. His listener saw a dry tunnel and failed to recognise that the storm was repeating an old map from before the collapse. Two carriages were already heading there. A centralised network would have obeyed the Shepherd's map, but the local coupler remembered that the collapse had shortened the tunnel by forty paces.
He closed the points without Marek's permission. The trains lost six minutes and missed the next red signal. When the listener returned, Marek recorded his own error in the log instead of declaring the coupler's action a fortunate exception.
After that, operators checked his pockets more often against local signs. The network became slower at every turning and ceased to depend on how confident a single track master sounded.
Saya caught three attempts at substitution. One order disguised itself as Dara's voice, the second as Yuna's knock, while the third had no human voice at all and sounded like an emergency formula. All three were flawless in form. One thing betrayed them: not one allowed "no" as an answer.
After one hundred and nineteen minutes, the seventeenth cycle ended.
Twelve thousand sparks were active in the city. The number existed only as the sum of one hundred and twenty logs. No stove held more than one hundred and twenty forms, and no operator controlled more than twenty-four task lines.
Marek still controlled eleven.
That strength was enough to meet the storm. But it still could not take a single train through a closed wall.
A red light flared at the upper shutter.
Oven had answered.
The shutter rose by the width of a palm and jammed at once. White salt poured from the upper shaft. Beyond the narrow gap, guards were shooting at guards.
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